IN-DEPTH: Architecting a Deep Life (w/ David Dewane)
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I'm Cal Newport, and this is In Depth, a semi-regular series in which I talk to interesting people about the quest to cultivate a deep life. I'm excited about today's guest. It's my longtime friend, David DeWayne. Now, if you've read Deep Work, you might recognize this name. David, who is an architect, is featured in that book for his idea of what he called the eudaimonia machine.

a design for a theoretical office that maximizes deep work and

over distraction. So after my book came out, this idea, this design of the eudaimonia machine became a bit of a sensation. As David talks about in our interview, he got a lot of press about it. Eventually someone even built a version of his eudaimonia machine. So it had a life of its own. Since then, David has gone on to make these type of buildings a reality. He works with a cutting edge firm that tries to design the offices of the future for knowledge work. So keep it in mind, not just the physical spaces, but how they interact with how people think and distractions happen.

probably one of the most creative thinkers out there about the interaction of space and the ability to do things with your mind. So we talk about this in my interview, we get into it, this sort of interaction between offices and spaces from a massive office to how you design your home office to be more conducive to deep work. But the other reason why I have David on the show is that among the people I know, you spend as much time as he does systematically thinking about

what he wants in his life and how to make his life deeper. He is very good at life engineering and engineering his life towards depth.

So we get into that journey as well in this interview. We talk about his current life right now, which is really cool the way he has it set up and how he got there, including key turning points and the specific tools he used and has invented to help make his life better. Keep a particular eye out for our discussion of the Collins score, which is something I learned from him and he uses to great effect in his life.

So anyways, if you're interested in either more focus in your current spaces or more depth in your life going forward, I think you're going to love this wide-ranging conversation that I had with David DeWayne. But before we get into it, I want to mention our presenting sponsor who is making it possible for us to present this interview with no commercial interruptions. And that is our friends at done daily.com.

Done Daily helps you break free from the noise of shallow tasks and focus on the deep, meaningful work that really matters. Now, I know the people who created Done Daily. They were behind another company called My Body Tutor, which has been a longtime sponsor of the podcast. They're experts at online coaching. So having real people coach you, but using the internet to try to keep things affordable. And that's what they're bringing to the world of productivity. With Done Daily, you're assigned a coach to work with.

But this coach is going to work with a proven productivity system. So they will help you build a quarterly plan, lay out your weekly plan, and then organize a daily plan to stay on top of what matters most.

You check in on your plan daily with them for accountability and then debrief on your plan every week to see how things are going. I don't work for this company, but they know my ideas. And a lot of the type of ideas I talk about on the show, like multi-scale planning, are integrated into their system. And I was happy for them to do that because I've known them for a long time. And I think it's really cool to bring the idea of online coaching to the types of productivity ideas we talk about here. I think that's probably the future for

especially for very high performers, is to have a coach on board. And online coaching is much more affordable than trying to have like an executive coach actually show up at your office. So anyways, I thought this was a cool company. I've known these guys. I said, look, I want to tell people about it. So Dundaley, just go to dundaley.com, D-O-U-N-E daily.com to find out more. All right. With that, let's get into our interview with David DeWayne.

All right, I'm here with David DeWayne. David, I think you're best known to my audience, as I mentioned in the introduction, for your idea of the eudaimonia machine, which was in my book, Deep Work. Now, my memory is, correct me if I'm wrong, that began as an architect's sketch. You literally sketched this, no cliche, on a napkin. At a bar. At a bar. Yeah. Deep on circle. What's the backstory there? So the backstory is that, you know, I...

Found out about your stuff between So Good They Can't Ignore You and Deep Work. And if I remember right, you were blogging chapters out to Deep Work, right? Or like you were talking about the concept in some way, shape, or form. I used to use the term hard focus. And then at some point, I evolved that over to the word Deep Work, yeah. So a mutual friend of ours, Brian Chappelle, was deep working to accelerate his dissertation. Yeah.

And he turned me on to the concept of deep work because I was teaching architecture at the time and I was trying to accelerate my paper output. And so Brian and I were just having lunch one day and he's like, well, you're an architect. Like, well, it'd be the ultimate space for deep working, you know, because we were each doing all these workarounds.

Like, I don't know if I described this to you before, but I actually had to get an office in a different school on campus so that I could focus. Like, I got an office in the religious studies department, even though it had nothing to do with me and nobody knew who I was. Just to get away from distraction. Exactly. And Brian was writing his dissertation in his basement, right? And he had that like super regimented 5 a.m. 4 a.m. or something. 4 a.m., something crazy, yeah. And so we were kind of in like a little bit of a support loop.

And then I just sketched it out at lunch. And he had the idea. I think he emailed you without even telling me. And then you replied and you're like, yeah, let's get together and talk about eudaimonia. And I remember really distinctly taking this seriously and being like, okay, here is a description of how this should work. And I put it on one page and sent it to you. And it was very impactful experience.

Right. In my whole vector since then. I mean, it showed up in a lot of places. It would come up in magazines or I would see it and you reference like, I don't know that world well, but it seems like it had a bit of a half-life. It had a little cult following there. Yeah. Um,

Yeah, somebody built a version of it in Chelsea in New York. I didn't realize this. Okay, in Chelsea. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Full size? It was like a store. It was like a retail store, but it was reorganized along these lines. And then, yeah, it was there that, you know, a couple of people, like Seth Godin was there, a chip cutter from the Wall Street Journal was there, and that was a consequential one because he brought up in the future of...

The Wall Street Journal does this every year. They have their future work section. And that's where my current CEO read about it. And he's like, boom, here's my guy. So you would say now, I think this is what's interesting, is back then it was a sketch you were teaching architecture. Now your day job, in some sense, is making these type of spaces a reality. Do I have that more or less right? Yes. So I'm an architect and the chief experience officer of a company called Geniant. And what we do is...

we try to build workplaces that help people have great experiences and do their jobs better. The whole project grew out of it. I think your critique was that the whole world of work is in a way suffering.

Because we're so distracted all the time. I was looking at it purely from the slice of the experience of the physical space architect and thinking like, the space is damaged. Or the space is faulty or whatever, lacking. And there are other people looking at it from the technology standpoint. And so now I'm privileged to be in a position where that's my job, is to try to figure out how to enable companies to

take a totally different approach, like a totally elevated, evolved approach. And it keys together. Like it reinforces in a ton of ways your whole gestalt, you know. A question I'm often asked is people who are doing a lot of remote work. So they're setting up their own space at home. They're wondering, okay, if I wanted to get

Take advantage of my physical space. Have something like the eudaimonia machine type of advantage, but it's not an office for a lot of people. It's how I think about the physical spaces when I work, when I'm at my own home. Have you thought about this? Like if you really wanted to go, not radical, but you really wanted to get into it with someone who was working from home into changing the various spaces you work in, having multiple spaces, what's possible here? Okay. So I think about this every day. You know, I think about it a lot. Yeah. Um,

I think that we've become so used to languishing. Flourishing is the highest state of well-being. Depression is the opposite. Languishing is the middle. I'm just getting by. And I think that the open office kind of just generic world out there is largely about languishing. And so when you compare that to my house, where would I rather languish? In my house or here? It's just easier to languish at home.

I don't think a lot of people are flourishing at home because I think in order to flourish, you have to be exposed to other people. You have to give resources. You have to like, you have to, or for a lot of knowledge workers, I think you really need to engage in some sort of reciprocal, like energizing dialogue. And Zoom is a poor proxy for this. The reason I'm sitting in the HQ right now, talking to you in person is because if this was on Zoom,

I don't think the conversation quality would be as good. Yeah. So where you're going here is actually the key is to making the non-home office better. We'll prefer remote work if all we're doing at the office is we're in a cubicle on email. Like, I might as well be at home because I don't have to commute and I can go to do my Peloton over lunch. But if you build an office right... If you want to make something remarkable with other people, I think you have to do it in an environment that is...

set up in such a way that stimulates that kind of creativity, you know, and that kind of, that triggers the right kinds of relationships. So this is the whole switch from functional to performative, you know, like if there's one kind of just switch I want to flip in your head, is that like, and I'm stealing this from Rem Koolhaas, the greatest living architect, probably a Dutch guy, is that like,

Almost anything can function as a, let's say, a school. A trailer can function as a school. Yeah. Right? If your school is too crowded, you can put people outside. But, like, what performs as a school? You know, what gets those students in the right mindset? What, like, connects you to, like, history? This is like the Georgetown campus, right?

Totally. It's ornate buildings and the greens with the old trees. They don't need it. Georgetown could function in a commercial office building downtown. You could put every single student, every single professor in a tower downtown. Yeah. And they could function. But if you want to break into that next tier, it's about performance. And what performs as a workplace? What gets us in the right state of mind? What puts us in the right kind of relationship? And that's...

That is, it's a tricky thing. Like a great experience is a tricky thing to build. It's like a spell. Like you kind of conjure it. It's like a bubble or something. And it's easy to break it. It's like concentration. Like as soon as your phone buzzes or somebody taps you on the shoulder,

Okay, so here's a follow-up. Going on a rabbit hole here, but it's a fascinating one to me. Does this make sense to you, by the way? Absolutely does, yeah. So my follow-up is I had this idea I wrote about in the early days of virtual reality where I had done the first demos. One of my students had brought an early vibe to Georgetown. And I wrote this article on what I called immersive single tasking.

And my idea was because of exactly this theory you're talking about. I said space matters. I was thinking about Cambridge, thinking about Oxford. Space matters. The symmetry of those greens, the fireplace and the wood panel offices, you know, C.S. Lewis is in there. It matters for certain creative production. Well, it's like the Seinfeld thing about space. Yeah. It's cataclysmically relevant. Yeah. You remember that? So I was saying, okay, so at home, I was like, maybe something virtual reality is going to bring to us is space.

that are inspiring in that way. That you're single, I call it immersive single tasking because you'd be working on a single thing. And I think my example was, you know, you're in,

Hogwarts dining hall, which is based off King's College or whatever, with a whiteboard you can draw on with like the virtual reality and you're working on a proof there. It's going to be a completely different mindset than at your kitchen table. And people built these things, right? I mean, I said, okay, here's the limitations. It was resolution. I was like, you need a good enough resolution that you can actually read and see text and be able to write. And people have built these things that really has not...

caught on. So is this just we're not there yet or is there something about the physicality? So I think we're not there yet. Okay. I was totally blown away when I did my first demo of the Vision Pro, the Apple Vision Pro. I'm like, oh my God. You know, have you done it?

I haven't done Division Pro, though I've done other AR. I'm on the record. It makes old ARs, in my view, look like toys. Yeah, but what do you do in it? Okay, so there's a couple simulations that you walk through, which are kind of like, okay. And then there's this whole deep experience they do at the end where they basically play a reel of...

It starts, it fades out of black and Alicia Keys is standing from media away singing to you. It was so shocking to me

that I made the guy play like three times. But this is just like a virtual reality demo at this point. This is what the past you completely turned off and now it's in virtual reality. Well, what's weird about the Vision Pro 2 is that your peripheral vision is intact. So you can kind of look to the side and see real world stuff. But then there's like, it takes you to like a, you know, Greek ruins in Turkey. And then it takes you to like little kids playing soccer in Nairobi or something. And...

And I've been to Greek ruins in Turkey and I've seen little kids play soccer in Africa. And that's exactly what it feels like. You don't have the dusty bus ride to get you there, but it's like 80, 90% of the way. So like immediately after I had that demo, I emailed a guy I know who runs like a software company for architects. And I'm like, you got to do captures of like all the great buildings in the world and sell them to architecture schools. Yeah. You know, because like now you don't have to go to, you know, uh,

The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Like, you could get most of it, you know, just, like, sitting in your couch in your living room or something. Now, why hasn't it caught on yet? And, like, the sports stuff is actually awesome, too. Like, you'd really appreciate the baseball one where you're sitting on, like, the first baseline watching it at bat. I did one recently of the SNL 50th anniversary show. They put a 360-degree camera. Yeah. And you could sit next to the cameraman. Yeah.

while they were doing one of the skits. And like they were here and you could look over and the cameraman was right there and you could look behind you and the audience. Yeah. But do you buy this? My argument has been the way into this world is what I've observed a report on it is going to be screens.

So the number one productivity app in the Oculus store during the pandemic was this company called Immersed. And what they found was everyone else was trying to jump straight into a full virtual experience, typically with like group meetings. We'll all meet at the ruins of whatever. And it was friction was the problem. People like, I don't want to go through that. I don't want to put on my thing and log into a room. And like, I could just do Zoom on the computer I'm already at. So what Immersed did is they said, you know, you're in a virtual world, but here's what you care about. We give you monitors, right?

And at home, you only own one extra monitor, but in the virtual world, we give you four. And so it's like a more useful workspace, right? You have more monitors. So I'm working from home and I can have three big monitors because I don't own three big monitors, but they're virtual. But you're surrounded by on top of a mountain or this or that. And they found this got people into the virtual world.

Because it was convenient. It's a better screen than they physically have at home. Yeah. But then they were in a virtual world. And then other things could happen. My personal test for these kinds of things is when you forget. And there's like a slip in your mind. Yeah. And you forget that you're in an Apple store or whatever. And you think you're in Turkey, you know. And I guess it'll be exciting when that's readily available to everybody. But man, the...

The bar is so high for making all that content and stuff. And the adoption has got to really be agonizing for Apple and the companies that are invested in this because you haven't even tried it. When I think about these things instead, when I think about great experiences, I am like maybe...

oddly satisfied with the real world you know and uh like my favorite digital experience is that apple pay i didn't ask for it it's invisible it was free it just showed up one day and it makes my life easier you know so i don't have to think about extra stuff i can focus more on you know uh what i care about that day like what i set out to do that day did you read um

Rick Rubin's creativity book? Some of it. It's not a book you really read through. Yeah, he modeled it on the Dao Te Ching kind of, so you can kind of pick it up and put it down wherever you want. But there's one part in there that I thought you'd like a lot where...

He encourages you to plan your day with the concentration that you're like landing an airplane. And so like, yeah, the first 15 minutes of my day when I'm like time blocking and stuff and going through like my kind of core daily metrics, it like, I have it written right next to it, my planner. Like take the same seriousness to those 15 minutes as though you're landing an airplane. What does that mean? What does it mean to be serious about planning? Be really focused on like,

the two or three really important. Like for me, in my rhythm, in my daily life right now, I can probably achieve two or three really important things in a day. You know, and so I just need to, and I, I like carefully segment creative time out from normal time, a shallow work time. And so I really carefully budget because if you don't do it, the world just,

sweeps in and seals your time. I'll tell you something interesting about it because I was just writing about exactly this idea this morning. So I'm working on a chapter of my new book and it's about organizing your time as a prerequisite for changing your life. Yeah. And I was writing about exactly this idea and I was looking back historically where did this idea of MIT's most important tasks, like make sure that you figured out the most important thing and get that done first, right? It seems like a timeless idea. Yeah.

It arose early 2000s. Right. Okay. Like just that phrase? That phrase, but not just that phrase. That phrase came a little bit later. I think that was Gina Tapani at Lifehacker. Okay. Invented MITs. But it was, you had Brian Tracy eat that frog. Was sort of getting around that idea. If you eat the frog, eat a frog first thing in the day, everything else won't seem so bad. And his idea was do your most important thing first. Then Julie Morgenstern in the early 2000s wrote, never check your email in the morning.

And her idea was, before you do anything else, spend one hour on the most important thing because you're not going to get to it. And then the bloggers took over. Leo Babuda, that's where I first came across it, is in Habits. And then I wrote about it. This, by the way, is like one of the issues I'm having now when I'm using AI, asking about the origins of different productivity ideas. My articles keep coming back. So it's become oddly circular. I wrote about this back then. But this idea emerged sort of concurrently with email culture. Yeah.

And I wonder if it wasn't as relevant in 1992. It was, I have time. I have two meetings today. And my problem is like filling my day. But you get to the early 2000s, we introduced this idea of make sure that you do the thing that matters first because that might be your only chance to get to it. Yeah. No, I could see that. I like Ferris' kind of idea of make before you manage. I just think that...

The sort of situation I've carved out for myself is that I have decent amount of control over my time, especially like I know the hours of the day where I'm pretty productive and I try to really focus on taking things off my master task list. Like I don't have to go looking for stuff to do. It's all there. Like I've captured it or configured it or whatever. And...

like I kind of tee it up and I go for it. But man, I look at other, like, because people share their calendars and stuff, you know? And- I mean, you're talking about, you get a lot of communication, like you're in it, right? Like there's emails, there's meetings all the time or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I have to, I look at other people's calendars and it's just jammed all the way. And I'm like, man, how do you get anything done? You know? But- How do you resist that? Um-

I try to not, I personally try to just focus on doing fewer things but doing them well. And I try not to, I try not to show up

Or like volunteer to show up to meetings where I'm not contributing. Yeah. Unless there's something like there's a series of meetings that are within my company that I'm not participating. Other people are like presenting forecasts and stuff like that that I love because I can feel like the pulse of the company and stuff. But I just, I don't have a lot of meetings that aren't mission critical. And most of my meetings are external to like with

people that control workplaces for other companies that I'm trying to sell my services to. So I think the biggest thing that helped me have an under-scheduled calendar is just killing the pseudo-productivity dragon and being like, don't

assume that you're more valuable to the company because your calendar is full. Yeah. I just met last weekend. He just retired, but he was a president of a relatively large company and had been

for most of his professional career. And the story he told me is he said, look, my calendar was filled because of exactly what you're saying. This is what makes me useful is people want to talk to me and I can talk to them and give them guidance or help them make decisions. This is why I'm useful. Then he hired a new CFO and a really high level executive assistant. And they kind of put their heads together and came back and said,

You have too many meetings. And here's what we're going to do. We're going to block off a non-trivial amount of time every day. And the executive assistant is like, I'm going to protect that like you're at your daughter's wedding. So this is time that I'm not going to – we're not going to let meetings go into it. He's really worried. But that's like three or four meetings and then –

And he said after that change, it was, you know, night and day. He felt like he was 5X more useful. Not productive, but useful. He had time to sit and think and strategize. And it turned out that there was this back pressure in meetings that would fill every minute. Anyway, there's no end to it, right? So it's not like those three extra meetings was the difference between success or not. And then the story I told back, I tell this in a world without email, is that General Marshall said,

Chief of Staff of the Army during World War II. The person in charge of the entire war effort, essentially, right? Back here in D.C. Didn't work past five during World War II because he had a heart condition. And like back then, the doctor's advice was don't work past five so you don't have a heart attack. So he ran...

World War II. Fixed schedule. It was fixed schedule. He had to get congressional approval that completely changed the lines of communication within the war department. He said, there's too many people reporting to me. Here's what we're going to do. I'm going to talk to these five people and then these people will handle these people. And if you're going to have a meeting with me, you're going to bring all of this stuff in advance. That meeting is going to be 10 minutes. And most of this stuff I'm not going to do anymore. And it turned out it was all a knob you could turn. And you could turn that knob to fill every minute of your day. You could turn the knob to work till five. And he was just as effective. There was just a

element of intentionality. I mean, you sort of just have me now on a workflow tangent. I still want to get to the main thing I want to talk to you about. But all right. So the main thing I want to talk to you about is I do think about you as someone who's very intentional about your life.

Thank you. And I want to break down some of the things you've done to get there because I think it's useful for my listeners who care about the deep life. But I want to paint the picture a little bit more. We've talked about your job. We know you're an architect. Now you have this job where you're helping to design sort of the workspace of the future. That's like a Disney Epcot term, but you know. Right. But you also have, tell us about the farm. Epcot was pretty radical, by the way. Okay, so yeah. One of the things that I feel...

happy about in this conversation is that I do kind of feel like a representative of the audience. Like I'm not a famous person. Nobody, like I don't have a, I'm not an author of some other book that's coming here to kind of do that. Like I, and I'll give you your flowers just once really quickly that I attribute a lot of the things that make me a kind of, um,

an intentional person to the fact that I've like, I've taken a lot of your lessons really seriously and applied them over a long period of time, like a decade. This is why I'm having you on. We want to hear the story. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So, um,

So where do you want to start? The farm right now? Tell me. Yeah, tell us about the farm. Okay. Like where you live normally in the farm and then I'm going to wind you back to how we ended up there. So I'm from a small town in Wisconsin, but I live in Chicago. And my wife and I are from the same small town. And we decided during COVID...

And we've been thinking about it for a while, but we wanted a country spot that is kind of a complement to our city spot because our jobs depend on being in the city.

And so... And your city spot's really a city spot. Row house, like you know all the people. You have a shared courtyard. Yeah, I live in a great neighborhood right close to a university, Hyde Park, south side of Chicago. It's kind of like Tacoma Park or Georgetown. But yeah, it's great. And it's like a working class neighborhood. And we found a...

We were looking and looking for like a country spot. And we finally found a really interesting one that is like five acres right in Lake Michigan. You know, like 10 minutes outside my hometown. And so... An orchard, nonetheless. No, it didn't have an orchard. Oh, you planted that? Yeah, we planted the orchard. So it was just five acres when you got it. So we, yeah, we bought it. And it wasn't expensive. It was like, I think we paid $170,000.

Yeah, because the house was... It was an old barn. Yeah, an old barn. From the 1870s, and then it had a two-car garage attached to it. And so we converted the garage into a thing, but we had to put in a well, we had to put in gas, we had to put in electric. And those weren't bugs for me, those were features. Yeah. Because we got to design everything. I like building stuff. And so it was cheaper. I could never have afforded to hire a contractor to do all that stuff.

And so... And how far is it from your house in Chicago? Two and a half hours. So we can migrate there on the weekends and stuff. And pragmatically, the way that we did it is that we were like, well, Airbnb it when we're not there. And that worked out perfectly. You know, we kind of have a push-down pop-up system where if there's a big event in Chicago, we can Airbnb our place in Chicago and go to the farm. And it works out. So, like, we're not rich people. You know, very middle-income folks. And...

But we really wanted this to work. And we came up with an imminently practical solution. But now it's like... I joke around with you probably, but every day I'm there is a plus two. Yeah. Every day I'm working there for sure is a plus two. You have the writing. What do you call it now? The writing... My writer's cottage. Cottage, yeah. Or Dark Star. I love this part of it. Yeah, so...

We have three little kids and it's a lot of noise. And when I'm there, sometimes you want to get away from that. So I copied Mark Twain's Writer's Cottage. And other people have had these. We've probably jumped around about...

Frederick Douglass had one. These other writers have them. And I do like writing. I'm working on a book project that I will get to at some point here. I think the writer's cottage, like building a writer's cottage was the ultimate act of procrastination on this book project. Well, the ultimate move is what Michael Pollan did where he wrote a book about building his writer's cottage. That's the meta move right there. Yeah, touche. So anyway, no, it's like a...

octagon building about the size of this room and it sits in the field like beyond the orchard looks right like Michigan and it is like my favorite place in the world you know and I it cost $2,000 to be

And materials from Lowe's. And off Craigslist. You know, it's not like these things are not. But it took a lot of time. It took a lot of hours. But again, that's a feature. You know, it was fun to build. Your schedule is like most weekends. Most weekends. You would head out there. Yeah. And then sometimes if there was something going on in Chicago, you would... Bail. Airbnb and go out there longer. Yeah. And we just got comfortable Airbnb in our house too. Yeah. You know, so it's like a lot of people kind of raise their eyebrows at that, but...

hey man, whatever makes it possible. It's really great for the kids. It's like my life is this really beautiful kind of two alternating currents where on Friday I can get out of the city. I have a couple afternoon calls that I can take on the road. And then I pull up to the farm. It's like I get out and it's just quiet. And

I can notice little changes in the landscape. I'm so attuned to that landscape now. The day-to-day, especially in spring, it's like I can see things changing. And that's really exciting to me. And then Sunday evening...

I, you know, pack up, go back to Chicago and I turn my 94 or whatever and I see the skyline and I feel like seven feet tall. Yeah. And I'm like, all right, let's get back into this, you know? And it's so, it's such a great way to live, at least at this stage in my life. But there's one other thing in my drawer at the writer's cottage. I don't know if I told you about this, but...

I hacked your time block planner. Yeah. And I have my own version of it. But I built a life time block planner.

You mean like on a year scale? Yes. Ooh, interesting. So it goes from now until I'm 100 years old. Yeah. And each spreads like a year. Yeah. And so there are projects that I have that I know I don't have the bandwidth to work on them now, but I don't want them rattling around in my head. So I put them in my life block planner years out, you know? And you look at it. And I look at it all the time. Yeah. Yeah. Well, from a lifestyle-centric planning perspective...

So the farm is a solution to a vision. Because we talk about this a lot on the show, that in lifestyle strategic planning, you don't start with the goal. Like, I want to buy something here. You start with the vision of the lifestyle. Like, here's what I want in my life that we don't have. And then you look for creative solutions that gets that there. So what was the goal that eventually the farm became the solution to? I think just...

What were you thinking when envisioning your lifestyle? This is what's missing. I think it's just the pace. Years go by like that. And I think that there was something else about...

Like returning to our roots. Because your hometown was nearby. Well, not just that. Yeah, like my hometown was nearby. My parents are kind of aging and they're there. I want my kids to have a relationship with them. But I was tucking my middle kid in when we were at the farm one day. And I was telling her, I'm like, you know, when our people immigrated here, they came right to this county.

Yeah. And she's like, what? Really? Do we have a photograph? And it's like right after the Civil War, potato famine, Irish people. And I'm like, yeah, we got a picture. And she's like, I want to go put a picture on the guy's grave.

And so we found the picture, made a copy of it, put it in a little frame, and took it out to the cemetery and found the guy's grave. So your relatives, there's a cemetery nearby that has like your relatives are there. The first guy from Ireland. He was born temporary. Now there he is. And so every successive generation has kind of come up there. And so, I mean, that's different.

Then when you're in Chicago and it's kind of like anonymous in a way, you're absorbed into this larger thing. Like when you first were thinking about those general goals, I want to slow things down. I want some connection. You're probably thinking generally like the country. You have some part of our life that's slower back to our roots. Was there, I'm imagining there was like, okay, let's look at the obvious options. The orchard was also a really big deal.

You planted the orchard. Yeah, and they're cider apples. They're hard cider apples. Was that part of the original plan? Well, so my wife and I, we lived in Paris briefly when she was doing a study abroad. And we discovered in the French countryside, they have this Normandy champagne-like apple cider. And we're like, oh my God, we should make this.

How long ago was this? 2010. So it had been lurking. Oh, yeah. It had been like a detail that became a part of your lifestyle vision. You and your wife are bumming around rural France and you're like...

We should get a country spot and plant an apple orchard. Yeah. You know? Meanwhile, you're in D.C., then you're in Chicago. Yeah, you're buzzing around. Yeah, you're buzzing around. And you're getting jobs and getting promoted and all that stuff. But then eventually it's like, we got to get serious. And so we, as a kind of forcing mechanism, we used our 20th anniversary as like, that's, we're going to have a reunion or like a kind of a reunion of the people that came to our wedding, you know? Yeah. And we're going to do it at this farm. Yeah.

And we did. We did. It was awesome. Yeah. Well, but when you first, so practically speaking, I'm assuming when you first like, okay, we have this deadline. We know we want country connection to roots. Yeah. Orchard. Probably the first thing you did was what will fire up Zillow. And you're looking at vacation homes for sale. And it's like super expensive. And that might be a place where. We were even looking when we were here. You know, we looked at an orchard actually in.

Like by Roanoke or something. But like, yeah, you look in a non-serious way for a while and then you kind of get more serious about it. And COVID was sort of like, okay. And then also it's like,

you know, we're running out of time. Yeah. What are we going to do? And so... But you got creative, right? Because a lot of people might have got stuck with like, okay, I'm looking up like nice houses on the lake and they're all $800,000 and I don't have $800,000. So I guess that plan's not going to work. But you kept working. We found it the day it came on. Yeah. And we put an offer in like a week later. Yeah. And...

Also, I mean, like, from the financial standpoint, I just traded my 401k for that, basically. I cashed in my 401k early, absorbed all the penalties and stuff, and it didn't really hurt my feelings too much because I want to work. I love working. Yeah. So I want to work till I die anyway. Yeah. But, like, and plus, like, it's a good investment, too, even though I don't want to sell it or anything. But...

You're thinking about the next 20 years. I had to make a non-trivial choice about like, should I risk this thing on that? And it was the best decision I ever made in my life. Yeah. I wanted them, you know? I don't want anybody... You're prioritizing the next 20 years, like making those... Totally. Making those as good as possible as opposed to just maximizing...

30 years or whatever, that period of life. Yeah. Tell me about the Collins score. Yeah. I threw out this thing that like every day at my farm's a plus two, you know, that was a subtle note. I talked about it briefly on the show about a month ago, but it's worth bring, bring to speed again. Yep. So about six years ago, Ferris interviewed, Tim Ferris interviewed Jim Collins, the guy, the author of good, great and,

a handful of other like landmark books. I consider him like the Peter Drucker of the 21st century. Yeah. I told you I got, I met him at some point after that. He gave me some advice. Nice guy. He's a super, like I didn't have to imagine. I don't know how I got in touch with him. He's hard to get in touch with. Yeah, I know. I am. I'm not really a star chaser like that, you know, but I, if,

I look forward someday to hopefully meeting him. We have a lot of things in common. If you go to his website and you go to his further reading, he's like the only person I've ever met who's listened to more Great Courses series than I have. So we can have a fun laugh about that. But he said something on Ferris' show that really stuck with me or caught my attention, and then I implemented it right away, which is he...

He tracks every day three things. He brings up a spreadsheet and he does little bullet points of the things that happened that day. And then the second column, he records the amount of creative time, what he calls creative time. You'd probably call it deep work. She'd send me how to call flow, whatever. Heads down, focused work. And then the third column is a rating, like a daily rating.

like a grade and it's highly subjective. It's just a body feeling. How did my day go? And it's on this very specific scale, which I think is the, probably the most genius part of it, which is negative two, negative one, zero plus one plus two. Yeah. So you have like zero is languishing. Like yeah, zero is literally languishing. And I think like, well, I'll ask you, what do you think that score is actually measuring? Subjective assessment of your subjective field of the day.

Like a zero to me... I think it's measuring Jim Collins' individual flourishing. Yeah. But like zero would be pretty consistent for people. I would imagine zero is...

I don't even really know what happened today. Yeah. It wasn't bad. Like I wasn't sad. I wasn't like stressed out, but like nothing also got me all that fired up. I, you know, I had some emails. I had some meetings. I think people's, if you're not paying attention, if you're not measuring this, I think that the default, it hovers around zero. Yeah. Because if you're in the negative territory too long, you're probably going to want to make,

Some changes. Yeah. But what people don't do is push themselves to the positive territory. That's flourishing. Yeah. And so I started tracking. How long? Set this up. How long? This is a while for you. Right after I heard about it. So six years ago. Yeah. And I started doing it with my mentor. And like, so we would start out our days time blocking.

And then we would like text each other our schedule for the day. And then at the end of the day, we'd text each other a rating. And you used the Colin scale. And we used the Colin score. Yeah. Like that exact rating. And so a couple of things occurred to me like immediately. Like one or the first thing is that I knew what got me into negative territory. Okay. And I deleted that. What was it?

It's going to sound strange, but fighting with people, you know, like... Just beating people up on the street. It's stressful. I grew up in a family of Jesuit lawyers, and we would just fight for fun. They can argue. Yeah. Jesuits can argue. Everybody fights for fun, you know. And... But...

And I think I used to be more aggressive like that. And then I just realized it was actually emotionally draining, you know? Like family members or people you worked with? Worked with, yeah. Like being more confrontational about things like pushing people and stuff, you know? And I just realized like, man, that's not helping. And the other thing was certain people kind of trigger...

If I was in meetings too long or if I expected a certain kind of feedback from somebody and I wasn't getting it, it would bring me down. And so I just kind of avoid that. There's like negative score people in your life? Kind of. That's interesting. Yeah. Or people that can kind of trigger negative score stuff if I ask them for the wrong thing. Anyway, so probably two or three other negatives. Actually, I'll tell you right now what triggers negative, which is

I have very specific goals that I'm responsible for. And if I look at where I spent my time that day, you know, look at my goals and they don't match, that's a problem. You know? Professionally. Yeah. Unless I had like a really good excuse, you know, like somebody came to me with a problem that was urgent and they turned to me and I addressed it in a fine way. So like...

Maybe that was apart from my responsibilities, but I handled it and good. So I'll give myself a plus for that. But the other thing that was actually probably more positive than eliminating the negatives was setting daily realistic goals. What could I do today to get to a plus one? What might I stretch to to get to a plus two? Did you know what...

You didn't know what those were, I'm assuming, until you've been measuring. Like, in other words, did you have to discover what works pretty consistently for a plus two day? You know how you feel at the end of that. You know? But like, did you discover something you wanted to prioritize before? Totally, yes. So like, what's something you discovered that would reliably deliver like a plus one or plus two day? Manager, just manage your expectations and then don't waste time. Don't just like, don't allow time to just bleed away. You know? Like, I think it's like,

You contain the leaks. And you do get a sense of accomplishment from knocking that one thing. I try to be very particular about the things that make it onto my master task list. But then aggressive about getting them off. Things that linger on that list. These are like at the project scale? Yeah.

Yeah, at the project scale, exactly. So not wasting time for you means you made non-trivial progress on something from that master list. Yeah, and I will... So my quarterly or my planner, my time block planner, I do it quarterly. And so I set quarterly goals that I review basically every day. Yeah. You know, because they don't take long to review. And then I just make sure that...

The part that I'm actually struggling the most with is taking the time on Monday to really lay out the week. Yeah. If I review my old ones, those week spreads are undercooked. I keep trying to convince myself to do this end of day Friday.

Which makes sense on paper, right? Because that's actually the slowest part of the week. And you get the benefit of the weekend of being like, I know what's going. But it's really hard.

It's like you're done by Friday afternoon. But the problem is Monday morning is everyone's rock and rolling. And it's difficult to take the 90 minutes. It can take a while to really get your arms around things. So I've been struggling with that too. I think on paper, Friday end of day makes all the sense in the world. But psychologically, it's difficult. Monday makes more sense. But...

It's hard to give it the time Monday morning. It's an important link in the multi-scale chain, though. You got to get that week in there because you can't just go from quarter to day. I think that you... Yeah, the week really unlocked it for me. You can build a lot more momentum. I want to finish the con score thing really quick. Yeah, yeah. Let's go. What I'm experimenting with at work right now is trying to promote this as a broader metric

not just within my company and my work, but like within the field of architecture, you know? And... Well, I've told you, if people had to do this every day in a normal office job, you couldn't hide from the fact, like we would have to burn down the building where they make Microsoft Outlook. Yeah. Like people are like, well, this is just, wait a second. Okay.

Oh my God. What I'm doing in this job is making me miserable. There's no metrics in knowledge work. I call it the metric black hole, you know, in deep work. It's like, if people were actually measuring that, they'd be like, I am upset. I did email and meetings all day. That's not a plus one day. So now I have access to, within my company, I have access to real researchers, anthropologists and ethnographers and people with like masters and this stuff and PhDs in social sciences. And like,

My personal background is in high-performance buildings from an energy and resource standpoint, like zero-energy buildings. Buildings that use very little water or have a low carbon footprint. That was really easy and objective because those metrics are... You can count it. Here's how many volts... You can build a model. Yeah. But if you ask somebody...

Build me a high-performance workplace that makes my people happier, more productive. You can't look at a mechanical engineer and they're going to be totally worthless. But you can ask a social scientist and they can give you some metrics. But I think that this con score thing, if you had... So this is what I want to experiment with within my own office, is get a series of my colleagues tracking

Okay? Yeah. And we have some underutilized parts of our office, like conference rooms and old offices that aren't really used for anything. And so I want to get a group of people tracking and then anonymize and pool the column score. And to be clear about it, practically speaking, you're putting down the score number and then a sentence or two without overthinking it. Yeah. Just instantaneously.

In the moment, why did you put down that score? And that he leaves vague. Yes. And it's one sentence, two sentences. So my tracker that I'm designing is a slight modification on Collins based on my own sort of... How dare you? Yeah, I know. Oh, it's funny. Usually I try to default towards Collins. And he actually, I think, folds his personal life and his work life together. That's a tough decision for me. I'm trying to just separate it and just focus on work stuff. Well, yeah. But to him, it's all the same thing. Yeah. But in the morning...

the tracker would ask you two questions. One, what time are you going to shut down? Two, which is helpful because then it reminds you to shut down. And then two, what would you have to achieve today to get a plus one? And then at that time you set, it comes back to you and says, how would you rate your day? In your vision, this is an app? Yeah, on your phone. And then how would you rate your day? Why would you rate it that way? And then...

How many hours of creative time or of heads down focus time did you have? And so what, from the research standpoint, what you would get every day is two hours

quantitative metrics and one qualitative metrics. And that's really the magic because the qual and the quant together create the full picture. A lot of times people just track quantitative stuff and you can tell like what's going on, but you have no idea why the qualitative stuff tells you why. What are you going to tell a manager though? Let's say you do the research you're doing at someone's office and you find like, look, when, when people look at the qualitative and quantitative, when they're able to spend three hours,

heads down on something I think is important, they're plus one days and when they can't, they're negative days. You're jumping ahead. Yeah. What's next? Okay. So like, um, what I want to do with my team is get everybody tracking or get like, this is opt in. I'm not going to force anybody to track stuff, you know, and I think everybody just keeps their own data, but like pulls the number anonymously. Yeah. Um,

But just so it's accurate. That's important. But then what I want to do is I want to take some of these underutilized spaces and get everybody together and say, okay, hey guys, and this is an architecture group, so we know about designing space. But I want to be really intentional and say, how could we reallocate these spaces that give us the best chance of upping our collective con score?

what would we turn these into that would make us even happier or more productive and more effective architects? Would you then measure it? Yeah, and then we just keep tracking. And you can, through the qualitative data, you should be able to point to these things. And, you know, the subjectivity piece, some people view it, I think, fairly as a vulnerability because you're like, well, what if you get a nasty text from somebody, you know, from your spouse? Is that going to affect your con score? That day...

But the constant day after day after day after day, you build trends really fast. And so I'll tell you, I've become so effective at this that I changed my own personal scale from negative one, zero, one, 1.5, and two.

Because I'm so, I reserve twos for really exquisite days. I see. But I'm so regular at one that I'm trying to push it a little further, you know, and I've never had a negative two. Well, so what have you changed in your life? Because of this? Yeah. I think I take on less, for sure. So when you're busier, you had a harder time getting good scores. Yeah, because you always feel inadequate. Yeah.

Yeah, I was feeling like you're chasing or you're on the hamster wheel or whatever. I mean, or you're too ambitious about the amount of things you take responsibility for. Whereas if like, I would rather get half the number of things done, but do them as...

Like at a really high level. It's just an example of like my theory of administrative overhead aggregates. So the more things you're doing, the more the bigger fraction of your day has to be spent not doing things. That sort of ironic cycle. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's true. And like there's a, I think you would probably understand this and be able to articulate this better than me, but there's an inherent risk there that if I'm doing less,

I'm going to be perceived as not as interesting or not as well-rounded or not as comprehensive or whatever, you know? Whereas if you focus on the things that you're really interested in and curious about and you maintain like a long commitment to those, they blossom into something that's authentically interesting and exciting. And people like...

are attracted to that. A satisfaction engine. Yeah. Yeah. Like for what? Like they take you seriously. Like what's an example in your life? So for me, I mean, it is...

Well, even this con score thing. I didn't come upon that by accident. I came upon that because I'm obsessed with the concept of flourishing and how to help other people flourish. And so I'm trying. And I had developed rare and valuable skills in the high-performance buildings from an energy resources stuff standpoint. And now I'm trying to apply what works over here or to this other place. That's right on the very edge.

of what's innovative in my field right now. Right, so you're saying you're playing the long game on the idea you were just explaining to us, for example. Yes. But working on that and continuing to work on that might be a big innovation in the field. And that is a choice versus you could be much busier with many more smaller projects, which in the moment would make it feel like you had your finger in a lot of pies and we're getting after it and et cetera, et cetera. I can take that concept. I mean, I've got a...

There are a series of conferences that are influential in my field. And I want to use... I have the vision for a slide to start the talks that are coming this fall that is like 0.012 and then an arrow and like 1.15. And that would be my office's comp score moving from hovering around zero to plus ones. That's going from languishing to flourishing to...

Objectively. You know? Right. So if you could have that slide. If I say, here's what we changed. I felt like we tried this in the physical space, then it changed the score. Then we tried this and it made a big difference. Yeah. Whatever it is. And it might not work. Yeah. You know, and I'm like a little bit...

probably in a kind of a petty way, afraid that I'm going to try this thing and people are going to reject it or whatever. But I don't care that much. Like my ego has been diminished through our failures. Do you think keeping the score helped motivate the farm in the sense that now when you're thinking about your life in this way, you're thinking this is going to be a plus two generator? Well, I know for a fact that I was,

I didn't know that it would be as effective as plus two generator as possible. And like, I literally, I was like, I remember, it's funny that you mentioned this, this memory kind of flashes back, but, um, you know, like chest notation, like how they give like exclamation points next to good moves. And like, if it's a really good move, it gets two exclamation points. It's kind of similar to the plus plus two thing. I know that's from you. You explained this to me once. Yeah. Yeah. And,

In all the chest notation I've ever seen, I saw one three exclamation point move, which was Bobby Fisher's Game of the Century. And Ruben Fine's commentary on that game. But the day we actually got the farm was the only plus three day I've ever had. You mean when you're walking through the property? We signed the contract at the bank and we went over and it's like ours. That was plus three day. And I was just so happy. But what I didn't anticipate was that... And we got it.

in January in Wisconsin on Lake Michigan during a winter that was cold as hell. Right, so it's not like a beautiful spring day. No, no, no. The birds were chirping. No, no, no. And so our initial wave of work to get it kind of going, I was working out there when it was like 10 degrees every day. Every single day in that first month that I was there was a plus two. You spent like a whole month out there? Yeah. Yeah. Every day was plus two. And then like I'd never...

expected or experienced anything like that. It was just... And now they're not all plus two days out there, but it was so great. Yeah. Wow. But that's not the... I don't think that's the point. The point isn't huge string of plus twos. The point is trying to get from... Trying to just live a flourishing life. And that's why I think...

I think the days that are, you know, for a lot of people, zeros are the days where you just feel what happened. Yeah. Where did today go? Yeah. You know, and what happened is, you know, your device still had your concentration and you spent too much time worrying about things that you can't control and reading about them in the New York Times. Yeah. You know, and letting people live rent-free in your head. Yeah.

instead of just getting control of your own situation. I mean, what's interesting to me about it is, like if we look at your life, for example, it's not built on some radical decision.

It's not built on, I was miserable, this is the cliche, and we moved to a sailboat and whatever. And through the radicalness of it, this is why I like the call and score idea, is I feel like it allows you to explore the landscape of possibilities in your life more systematically and build out a flourishing life, which is different necessarily than

a life built around some sort of central radical decision. So it's built, my life is built on the ashes of a failed radical decision, you know, and the, but like it was a youthful, you know, indiscretion, let's say, where like when I was an undergrad, I tried to do a sort of a heroic, you know, design build project in Central America, you know, the poor community.

And I didn't have a sustainable skill set. So even though it was like really deeply aligned with my mission and my values and even like the skills I was building, I didn't have the ability to execute. But this was a thing back then. Yes. But I remember this. There was like the late 90s, early 2000s. Yeah. This idea of, it's like Project Water.

It was like, just follow your passion. Be useful, though, right? And it was like the ideas you would go somewhere and build a school was a big thing, right? Pencils and Promise. Yeah, Project Water. So I was right in the mix with all those things. Three cups of tea. Yeah, and even design or architecture for humanity. So this is actually what the Dalai Lama calls sloppy sympathy.

You go to a place where you see a problem, you want to help, you throw a little energy at it. But if you really want to be helpful, you have to move there. And you have to transform your whole life and be extremely humble. And accept a lot of failure before you probably get successful.

And I did not take that approach. Some people do take that approach and they like, they're, they, they do really impressive work. But like, I felt the sting of taking the leap before I was ready. And what happens is you get alien, you, the failure alienates you from the thing that you really love, you know? So, um, I think all got confused with the thing. The goal was the vision. Here's something that's important to me. Yeah. We often confuse it with the radical goal.

Well, if I do this radical goal, which was inspired by this feeling of whatever it is, I want to be helpful or whatever it is. But then the radical goal becomes the thing. And so when that fails, you lose the connection. We talked about lifestyle-centric planning, the difference between the properties you're looking for in your life and the particular things that might generate those things in your life. Yeah, I'm with you.

I'll give you another example that's contemporary for me. Finish the story, though. So what happened? The project was a failure. I felt humiliated, but I kind of nursed that wound for a long time. But then that's when I came across So Good They Can't Ignore You, and I started connecting dots. Oh,

Rare and valuable skills. Okay, so there are rare and valuable skills you would need to be successful in that environment rather than just an architect working in Tacoma Park. Oh, career capital. Maybe I shouldn't have skipped steps here. Maybe I should have become an effective human being first and then gone on to those types of things. So that was really meaningful in terms of

you know, creating a structure where I had like greater patience, a different set of expectations about what was possible. And so like a big project that I'm gearing up to take on right now is writing a book on spaces of hyper creativity, which I think is a good idea. The architecture of hyper creativity. But the reason that you think it's a good idea probably is because it checks, I've taken the time to check the other boxes about like, um,

Is writing something I can even do? Or like writing for editing something I can do. Is this an interesting idea? But I can see a lot of people that are listening to this that might be nursing book projects of their own being like, okay, I'm going to throw a ton of energy at this. And then if it fails, they're going to feel shitty about it. You know? And...

That's unfortunate. And it doesn't have to kind of be that way. You can take a more measured methodical approach into like Brad Stahlberg's kind of thing. It's like the consistency and like owning up to the fact that like the consistency is more important than the intensity. And I would say with that early project of mine that was a failure, it was intensity over consistency for sure. You know? And then...

acknowledging up front that every single day you sit down to write is going to probably be painful. Yeah. You know, and just being, or sometimes it's not. And if it's not, enjoy that and ride that wave as long as you can. But if it's not going well,

That's okay. Just keep grinding. It's like building something. Yeah. Some days it's a pain. Yeah. And... The joints don't fit that day. Your cuts aren't great. Yeah. It's tedious that day. And man, it helps if you enjoy building stuff. You know? Like if people look at this farm project and, you know, they're like...

Was that fun? And I'm like, yeah, for me, it was really fun. So if you can figure out a way to like, and my wife is different. She doesn't like to do construction stuff. So it's not plus two days for her if she's swinging a hammer or sawing stuff. But for me, it's great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so you came out of, I always, when I talk to you, I internalize a lot.

Yeah? Yeah. What do you mean? I do. Well, about your approach, I like the intention of it, but I like that you act on it. You know, you make choices, you make changes. It's easy to get stuck in the zeros or to get stuck in this isn't quite working. There's a lot of negative ones happening, but it seems difficult to change. And I think you're better at, you're not scared of change. Would you say this is fair? Like the difference between you back then and now is you're not afraid of change. It's just your change is...

more evidence-based now than it was before. It's not on a vibe. You have data, personal data, insight data. You're like, okay, this is going to be better. So why wouldn't I do it? I feel like the core skills are so strong that even if whatever I'm currently focused on was a failure, I can reapply the same skill set to the next challenge. And I'm like, I feel like a very effective person. You know, I think, I think that the,

The positive thing about a lot of the systems that you have invented or aggregated or whatever, clarified for people, is that they get things out of your head so that you're not spending time circular thinking about something. And you're able to then be more present in the moment so that when you're working on something, you're applying your whole...

towards it so that it like and then like life is just easier man I mean how do you I think what's interesting also about your story is you have a job that like a traditional knowledge work yeah like high skill job

But you still have this life that's very like intentional. So how do you bring that thinking to a job where you have an email address, you have a calendar? Because often people think, look, if I really want to change my life in a way that's going to be like plus one, plus twos all the time, I have to be like a novelist. I got to leave my job. I can't also...

have a calendar and Zoom and email. Your job could be overwhelming and distracting and languishing. Yeah, I can just look side to side and see my peers. Yeah. So how do you keep it different? What's the key to David DeWayne's approach to knowledge work? I think it's about managing, becoming really good at managing expectations and becoming really, really good about managing time. I consider, like when I show somebody like,

my time block planner. Yeah. I describe it as the most essential mental health tool I've ever had. Yeah. You know, and like, I think that, um, I think, well, like I'm an ambitious person, you know, like I want to achieve something, you know, that's meaningful in my field, but I don't. So I take it seriously, but I like at the same time, if like, I, I view the effort as,

more important than the rewards. You know, and this is like just classic philosophy stuff, you know, try to disassociate the fruits of the labor from the labor itself, you know. But it doesn't let you slow down too. The slow productivity principle is...

Like the project you're working on, this vision you have for using these numerical scores to change architecture. Yeah. It's not really going to matter in the long term until we have this right. It's like my Apple Pay for architecture. Yeah. And if that happens six months from now or a year from now, it doesn't matter to you. It doesn't have to be done as fast as possible. What matters is you're working on it and it gets done. And like the hyper-creativity book, which would be great because then it would put into people's path

principles that are like they could apply. And I think I just have this personal kind of feeling that as we go into the AI kind of era that creativity is going to become a coin of the realm. Human creativity is going to be really, really important because a lot of the grinding work is going to be relieved and be what should we do?

why should we do it, you know, is going to be, is going to surface. So like when you study the, the environments around creative people and the process of creativity itself and get that out there into the public domain, like, man, that's, that's, if I could just do that, I would be pretty happy. But to be more concrete, like how do you avoid, for example, in your position, you have a team, not let's say check an email every five minutes. I'll, I'll, I was on my concrete email probably too much. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's not something I feel great about. But the tools are powerful. And the grip that they have on your consciousness is really powerful. What about meetings? Again, I think a lot of people...

I think the thing that's kind of freed me up a little bit is not being paranoid that my calendar looks empty to other people that are sharing my calendar with me. Partially because I have a physical planner, so I don't write a lot of this. I don't take the step of putting everything I do into Google Calendar. But also, I don't equate it with value.

My value comes from a totally different realm. And I am like laser focused on trying to create value in the way. And like the people that I report to understand what I'm trying to do. And they've given me the time. And to a degree, maybe I've earned the permission to get control of how I do that. But that means practically saying no to more meetings. Yes. Periods of inaccessibility, shutdowns. There are people that I look at.

all around me that are probably in too many meetings. Yeah. You know, and if you really just buckle down and say like, Hey, you know, I, like, I can't, I can't go to everything. Can I skip this one and just go ahead? I don't know. The people trust you have your act together on your time. Yeah. Just out of curiosity. Did you look at the planes marathon thing?

Which one? The Plains of Marathon. The email I sent you the other day about... Because I was captivated by your Elon Musk conversation with Brad Stahlberg and... What was the guy's name? Yeah. And it was about like... And I think this is another thing where people... I would imagine people in your audience, and even me, you look at somebody like Elon Musk and you're so...

at least pre-Twitter, with the stuff that this person was able to accomplish. And you kind of hold that up as, this is what success looks like, right? Yeah. Not me, though. It's stressing me out, but yeah. I did this exercise as a kind of like... And again, I did kind of a private writing project that was a build-up to my real attempt at commercial writing.

And, but just to get in the habit of day after day after day writing. And so this project was, it was very personal. It was a letter to my daughter and it was about the, like painting a picture for her about like the really beautiful moments in my life and what it felt like to be me at these different times, you know? And I collected a handful of maybe 20 vignettes and I,

after that conversation where you're talking about Elon and like our society or our culture's sense of status and sense of accomplishment and sense of success, I look back at that list and they're very mundane moments. There's nothing in there that's about like a huge professional accomplishment. There's nothing in there that's about like brushing up against a celebrity. You know, it's all just like, it's like a moment on the farm, like working in the orchard.

you know, or like working on a building project. It's about an early morning writing session and my daughter sneaks up on me, you know, and I have this like nice moment with her, you know, when she's little and I, you know, you know, or like the, like a child's birth or something. Like when you really think about like deep life for me, it's like those moments, like enjoy what you have. Yeah. Don't,

pegs so much of your sense of self-worth on a grandiose accomplishment, like on revolutionizing the electric car industry in America. Yeah. You know? And I think if you connect or if you were able to peer into the lives of people that have done those things, I bet you would find that they made a lot of personal sacrifices that

It would be pretty grim. Yeah, lonely. Yeah. Alienating. Yeah. Yeah, so like when I think about deep life, I mean, I think about like plus one day, you know? Yeah, I mean, it's engineering your life. That's one way to look at it. Engineering a life so that you have more plus ones. And it's not too hard to avoid the negatives. Yeah, it's the trend. Yeah. It's the big trend, you know? Yeah. And being...

Yeah, like being super intentional about it. Yeah. So this is what bugs me. We can jointly crack on these people. But there are a lot of people that look at ScanSet, self-help, you know, and this whole like advice and like productivity and like this whole subculture, you know? Yeah. You mean like the reviewers at the New York Times Book Review? Perhaps. They don't seem to appreciate it, I've learned. Yeah, but...

I think if you, like, if you really, I feel like I've been on both sides of this. I've been on the, I've been on the sort of hapless Don Quixote style, passion driven mindset, all your passions guy and ridden that wave. But I've also been on the like very regimented, very disciplined, very patient, very slow, very,

very focused side of this. And it's just better. Yeah. You know, it's not fancy. It's not, it hasn't made me rich. Yeah. Like in terms of money, but it's made me extremely rich just in terms of like my overall life satisfaction. Yeah. You know? Yeah. I mean, I have this argument often with, with the anti-productivity crowd, many members of whom I really like and respect because I think they're onto something. And, but they, they often, I think the setup, which I don't buy, but,

is, look, if there's structure in your life, then you're somehow internalizing capitalist narratives or Protestant work ethic. It's some sort of exploitative relationship from a cultural superstructure to your life that's benefiting other people and that the true... I can see that, but it doesn't take a lot of thinking to just realize that you don't deep work to do more for the man. Deep work to work less and to make your work better. If I could go back in time, I mean, I went to...

graduate program. The architecture. Yeah. It was so, the culture was so intense that I think there were 24 people in my graduating class. 17 of them were medicated for anxiety and depression. Yeah. Because we were in our studios constantly. And the people that weren't there

We're sort of like marginalized a little bit. Not serious. Yeah. Like, why are you, why did you even take up somebody else's? Somebody else could have gotten that spot and been here with us, you know? Man, if I could go back in time and I think I could have done better work, been such a, like a much healthier person and worked less time just simply by having a

like better time management yeah better like constant ability to concentrate you know and also not like and and readjusted my expectations and not tried to like do everything yeah you know so yeah i mean people don't what they don't often get like people who will look at deep work for example and and be like well this is all about maximization right so i often get the critique of like

And this is all about just like squeezing everything out of the day. And what about people who can't squeeze as much out of the day? And what's often missed is like that book was the follow-up to So Good They Can't Ignore You.

It was the answer to the question, so good they can't ignore you, said, if you have valuable skills, you can create your own life. And clearly you could see the bias in that book, that the visions I had of life was like yours right now. I was, you know, you have autonomy, you have control over your time. I was very stressed and I remained very stress sensitive. So it was a big motivating factor of that book is why do I want control? Because I don't want a life.

That looks like Elon Musk, right? I don't want, I'm running three companies and a master of the universe and have meetings all day. I want control and you can get control by being good at things that are rare and valuable. And Deep Work was like, well, how do you do that? And like, well, okay, focus, focusing on stuff, deliberate practice, get better, do the stuff that really matters. You don't have to be busy, right? So it's kind of ironic that for some people, Deep Work is seen as,

some sort of like hustle culture bro manifesto of, of like crushing it and getting after it. Where to me, that was the skeleton key for unlocking being able to go to the farm on the weekend. When I think about deep work, I just think about eudaimonia. It's another, it's a synonym. Yeah. You know, and, and,

For those of your audience that don't know what eudaimonia is, look up the Wikipedia entry. It's an old term that the Greeks had. I'd always say flourishing would be my translation. Yeah, deep human flourishing. What's also cool about eudaimonia is that the weak translation is happiness, but in contemporary culture, happiness comes and goes. You could be unhappy in this meeting and happy in the next meeting and then unhappy again. Eudaimonia was not that. Eudaimonia was like

it was the trend. Are you on the trend? The right trend. I think about, but it's also the feeling. It's like the flow feeling or a highly concentrated feeling. If you're applying that to, what's cool about eudaimonia in the way that Aristotle describes it in the ethics is that even an inanimate object could express eudaimonia.

So like for a knife, I think is the example he uses. It's to be sharp in cutting something. Yeah, it's very teleological. Yeah, so it's like the easiest way to think about that is like for you, what is the best version of yourself and how are you engaged? And so I think like something like deep work, it's not about...

Yeah, it's not about piling up more capital. It's about being sharp and engaged. Yeah. My program was different than yours. My grad program experience, the theory group over there at MIT, working too much would be bad. They had their own pathologies. But if you're working too hard, that might mean you're not smart.

And like for them, the ultimate was coming up with a brilliant idea, like a math insight, solving a theorem, being smart, being a monster mind. And so it was not a, it was a high stress place in the sense that huge imposter syndrome. But if you could get over that,

It was completely reasonable. You're like, yeah, I'm not here. I want to come in and stare at the whiteboard and like solar proof and then go play bongos or whatever. Like that would be like, that's really impressive. It had its own pathologies, but I think that also laid an interesting idea in my mind. It was like, yeah, focusing could be very valuable. It's very human. I mean, Aristotle thought that was ultimately the theology of all people was deep thinking because only humans can do that. That must be human.

human purpose. But they really didn't value busyness. And that really stuck. And I think that stuck with me as I was writing my books and thinking about things. It's like I came up in a place where busyness, like what value is there in busyness? Like what does that have to do in their lingo? What does that have to do with solving proofs? Like that could only get in the way. And so there was something nice to see that purity. It's also brutal because you're always being judged if you're smart or not. But it was simple. Yeah.

Yeah, I think, you know, like for whatever reason, this is where my mind's going when you're talking about this, is that like I think a good life is where you're, I mean, I talked earlier about the alternating, like my sort of, my charmed life of being alternating between like city life where I feel really engaged and charged up and then country life where I feel very slow. I think in like a, in a more day-to-day zone, yeah.

It's like the ability to concentrate on something and go kind of internal and grind and then come out of that and share it with somebody and get feedback. It's the kind of rhythm between highly social, highly focused. My long-standing critique on open office spaces is that instead of those things being intentional and putting a logical barrier around

visual, audio, proximity barrier between those things. You're supposed to do all that stuff at the cubicle. And at any second, somebody could tap you on the shoulder. At any second, somebody could send you an email that you have to respond to instantly. And it is just...

It is no way to live effectively. I've always thought open office is the physical correlate to an email inbox. The email inbox was like, can't we just have everything come through here? It always feels like a blender. Yeah. It takes your brain, puts it in like a Vitamix or whatever and just like... But this is the cybernetic vision of like the Silicon Valley inspired office, right? It's like this is what email and later Slack is. Like, can't we just be in this hive mind and we're just all...

talking to each other all the time. Things are moving back and forth. I'm answering your question. You're answering me this. You're sending me this file. What about this? And our minds will be melded together and out of that will come sort of distributed intelligence, which of course misses the way this wetware actually works in our head because we can't actually, we're not bees. We can't be plugged into constant unrelated conversations at all time and also flourish or produce good thoughts or not be completely stressed out. I pay a social cost at work for resisting Slack.

And I do. Like, I tell people, like, I only check Slack every once a day or something, you know? And it annoys people. Well, it's convenient if everyone's on it. Like, I would have to take a different approach if I was, like, more in the trenches on, like, a project day-to-day and that's, like, how the team was communicating and then I would change my behavior. But for me right now, it's like, how many more tools do I need to do the exact same thing? Yeah. You know? Like,

Email versus no email solves some problems. Fax machines were slow. Couriers were even slower. Voicemail was annoying. So like email kind of solved those problems. Like, okay, we're good. Yeah. And we don't need to use it as constant conversation. We don't need, I mean, I've always argued Slack is just the, they built the right tool for the wrong way to work.

Like if this is what you're going to do is use email, which was supposed to be a voicemail fax machine replacement as like an ongoing back and forth conversation machine. Well, that's not a great tool for doing that. Slack does that better. If what you want to do is let's just have everyone be in touch at all times so that there's no friction and we can keep things moving. Email has some shortcomings. So Slack will solve those shortcomings. So a great tool for implementing that way of collaboration, terrible way of collaborating outside of Slack.

like a small team working together on something. So it was, it's like, that's, it's a love hate relationship. I've always said, because if that's the way you're collaborating, like, I love this. It's better than email, but also you hate that way of collaborating. So it's like, I don't know what to do. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Like,

Yeah, if we're going to use Slack, then let's just get rid of our emails. I've heard of an architecture office one of my colleagues works in where they don't have individual email accounts. They just have project email accounts. I've been advocating for this. Yeah, it's a cool idea. It's arbitrary. The fact that it's a name...

At domain.com or whatever. I mean, that's just a happenstance that the original email programs, the mail daemon on Unix was from timeshare computers. So in timeshare computers, you had to have a login so they could bill you for the time you were using. In the original email, what it would really do is just leave text in a text file on someone else's account.

And then you could read it when you came into your account. And so that's where it was your username for timeshare computers became your de facto email addresses. But there's a counterfactual I've talked about where you have emails for projects. And that like completely changes, by the way, how the tool is used. Because as soon as I think about an email being your name,

I imagine interpersonal interaction that you're someone, there's someone on the other end of this and I want something from that person. And if you're not answering me, there's a person who is slighting me. And I imagine you're there and you saw it and you're ignoring me. You get all the interpersonal dynamics. If it's a project, all that goes away. Like, yeah, I'm sending a request over to this project and they'll get back to me. I'm sure multiple people are looking at this. Yeah, and they have a standard. They'll get back to you by the end of the day if it comes before whatever and you don't think twice about it. Like all the interpersonal dynamics are gone.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm excited, man. I'm excited about deep, deep life. Yeah. I'm curious. How is that? How is actually working on that project changed your, your outlook or change your habits anyway? We'll see. Yeah, we'll see. I'm in the first part still, which is like how to become, how to get your act together before you try to change your life. I sense you being more like discerning about it.

bigger things in your life, you know? Yeah. And I think working on the second part, which is much more about like what we're talking about today. Yeah. I'm worth, there's changes coming probably. I'm thinking about change. I think it'll probably lead to some changes. I mean, it's just a stage of life where I'm going through, you know, how your forties are. Yeah. Yeah. It's a different stage of life. And it like, but it like, it feels like, uh,

on the vector, like a logical conclusion to the vector you've been on for several books now? I think so. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can imagine, yeah, slow productivity is getting at, well, what does it really mean to be productive at work? And this, let me articulate my approach, which is it's slower. It's like you talked about. I want results over time, but my busyness in the moment is not that important. If anything, that's going to be

It was going to make me feel worse. And so that book is trying to articulate that. A World Without Email was my attempt to be like, for God's sakes, we have to be communicating all the time. Completely failed, by the way. A World Without Email. I mean, it failed to change the world. Do you think it was a victim of timing? It's a little bit of victim of timing. The pandemic was not when people wanted to think about that. But also, it's just a victim of difficulty, right? I always thought about World Without Email is just deep work for companies. Yeah. Deep work for teams. And maybe that's just a smaller market.

If it's something you can't put into place. But I've talked to a lot of – it's just hard. It's hard to move away. Deep work. Yeah, all these books are kind of on these trajectory. I see – I mean I'm rethinking – I'm in a different phase of life now. You've always been good at that too. You always write about the phase that you're in. That's the only way I know how to do it because if I don't care, it doesn't come through. But I mean I'm in a different phase. I've talked about this. It's after college, what were my two goals? Writing academia. And let me just focus, go deep on those, not be busy, want to do those well. Yeah.

And I've done those well, right? I've been in academia. I'm a full professor. There's no more promotions left to give. Published papers, won the awards. I did well there writing. I've done well there. I've sold a lot of books. That number is large. You've been in this one genre. There are other genres. Yeah. Yeah.

You're talking about my romance novel, I assume. That's what people are waiting for. Fifty Shades of Cal. Fifty Shades of Cal. No, like, do you ever think about what Michael Crichton would be writing about right now? I wrote a piece. Oh, did you? I wrote a piece for The New Yorker a couple months ago about AI or something. Yeah, yeah. It was like what... He would be going crazy. Well...

He would be going crazy, yeah. And I wrote – it was an interesting piece. I was like, okay, what are the real lessons from Crichton? And I'll just – my takeaway was actually unexpected. But my takeaway was because I know Crichton well, his work well, and I know a lot about him more than I probably should. But it's like really my takeaway is what Crichton really understood was –

The issue was not so much to people when it came to technology. And I told the story in the front of that article where, you know, when he was trying to write the Adronimus strain, it wasn't working. And his editor, Robert Gottlieb, was like, here's the problem. You're trying to write like an actual novel and get into the psychology of the characters and what's going on inside their head or this or that. And he said, stop that. Write it like a New Yorker piece.

The people aren't that important. What matters is the technology and the unexpected outcomes from the technology. Write it like you're Richard Preston in the hot zone 30 years later. Like you're reporting on something that happened and then the book took off. And that became his MO is that really what mattered in these books was the technology and the unexpected ways they unfold, not the characters. And I was saying this is actually kind of relevant for today because right now,

We like to snag our technological storylines onto people and actors and villains. And it's this person and this person. This is the villain in the play and this is the hero or whatever. And just anxiety generally. Yeah, without getting at the actual issue, right? So we want to demonize Elon Musk, but we don't get to –

introducing global conversation platforms might have been a wrong idea. Right. Because like Hammond was like a nice guy in Jurassic Park. He had good intentions and he got his liver eaten out by copies at the end of that book. It wasn't because he was flawed. I talked about Frankenstein. I went back to the original Mary Shelley. Yeah. And I was like, let me read... I replicated the passage in Frankenstein where they animated the monster. The technology is completely unspecified. It was...

The vitality flowed from the machine to the monster and the monster came alive. The whole thing was about the people. It was about the characters and the flaws and Dr. Frankenstein's ambition and how his fatal flaw broke him. And you go over to Jurassic Park, Richard Hammond's a cardboard cutout. What matters is the specific type of gene sequencer they were using too. So anyways, I thought there was a lesson there about the technologies themselves are often creating the impacts and we want to blame or care about the people. But then that obscures the fact that

Cloning the dinosaurs is the problem. Even if like a better person was running Jurassic Park, it might have still been a problem. Yeah. Do you know where the word sabotage comes from? Do we ever talk about this? No. So French or something? The word for like the French peasant wooden shoe is called a sabbat. And so when the initial machines during the industrial revolution, the agricultural machines showed up. Yeah.

like, it freaked the peasants out or whatever. And they took their wooden shoes and, like, jammed it into the gears and it would, like, break the machine and they could go back to work. Like a Ned Ludd type of mythology. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, like, it was literally the act of, like,

destroying the menacing technology that was coming after your job or whatever. So it seems like there's history rhymes, right? Yep. All right. Well, we have run over, but it's hard not to because I always like talking with you. Yeah. I really appreciate this conversation. Yeah, this is great. So I think we covered a lot of interesting ground here. And I would summarize it all as, you know, it's like architecting the deep life. There's a lot that goes into it, and it's not as simple as the one grand plan.

But there's a lot in here that I think is interesting. Also, we got to nerd out about some work issues like we always do. Yeah, there's a Buckminster Fuller quote that's useful or that I return to sometimes where he talks about or he just states, we're called to be the architects of the future, not its victims. Yeah, I like it. And I kind of think you're called to be the architect of your life, not the victim of circumstance. And what you have put out there in a series of tools and books and so forth is like,

Here are like a suite of tools.

apply them. Yeah. You know, and life just gets easier. Yeah. And they're content agnostic. Right. I'm not going to tell you, and this is how I'm writing my book right now. It's not, here's the five things you need for a deep life. This mix of friendship with this mix of adventure, this or that, like, okay, you can figure that out. But how do you have the tools to act on it once you figure it out? Yeah. So like architects. And just don't expect immediate results. Yeah. So architecture, you have to learn how to design and build a building. Yeah.

And then, like, the great architects use those tools to build falling water or whatever. But you got to learn the tools first. Yeah, I like where that's going. Yeah, like, yeah, and for architecture, I mean, last word, I guess, is that, you know, it's kind of a cliche in architecture that unlike rock and roll, you don't become successful when you're, like,

20. You become successful when you're like 50. And you just, like it's again, it's an expectations management game. Yeah. Takes a long time. Anyway. All right, man. All right. Hey, David, thanks for coming. Yeah. Thank you. All right. So that was my conversation with David DeWayne brought to us by donedaily.com. I really enjoyed that. Here's the, here's the context. I talked to David a lot, right? We've known each other for a long time. I knew him,

back before I even wrote Deep Work. He's featured in that book. He lived in DC for a long time, so we used to see each other more often, but he often comes through DC. He used to live in Tacoma Park. And we always have these sort of interesting conversations when he's coming through town and we have these wide ranging conversations. So to be able to capture one of those conversations on air, to record it, to share it with other people, that was kind of fun because I'm used to all these cool ideas about depth and focus and concentration and the deep life and

It's good to be able to share them with other people. I also like, I'm going to try to do this more when I have these conversations. I think I did this a little bit with Michael Easter as well. I like people who are doing cool things with their life and just to hear more about it, as opposed to just having on experts to talk about their ideas. Now, David had both of these things. He's an expert on space design for concentration.

But he's also an expert on his own life being really cool and having that farm and the orchard with the writing gazebo that he built out there. I think all that's so cool and romantic. So I like this idea of specific people...

living really specifically deep lives and just hearing how they did it. How better to learn than to talk to real people. Anyways, I'll probably end up putting some of this ideas on my book on the deep life because he has too many good ideas about this topic. So this was fun. Thanks for listening. Be back on Monday with a normal episode. And until then, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go.

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